I hadn’t thought about hominy in years, much less eaten it, until last week when I was wandering in the Mega-Mart.
I stopped in my tracks when I spotted it hanging out on a bottom shelf near the back of the store. I felt like I’d bumped into an old friend, and so I picked up a can to say hello.

His name popped up in my e-mail with uncanny timing. I was deep into planning the 80th reunion of The Rev. Silas A. Hudson’s descendants, and a few days earlier, I’d been to see “The Help,” a movie about racial prejudice encountered by black domestic workers circa 1963 Mississippi. You see, Leon R. Harris (1886-1960) was a black writer who spent most of his childhood living in my white great-great-grandfather’s Kentucky home.

I used to think that grass chiggers stalked everyone’s childhood, but to my amazement, I’ve run into people from other parts of the country who don’t know about them. By rights, the chigger should be our official state insect — if we must have one. After all, the epicenter of the parasite’s international breeding grounds lies in Kentucky, possibly on our Owen County farm. But no, Kentucky bestows that dubious honor to the Viceroy butterfly, an elegant bug, I admit, but why should personality and good looks dominate every election?

The summer I was 10, “Death” showed up uninvited at our front door and refused to leave. It wasn’t that I had not been introduced to him before. Growing up on a farm, I learned what buzzards circling in the sky meant almost before I could talk. Something was always dying, a groundhog or wild rabbit, or a ewe leaving an orphaned lamb for me to raise as a pet on a bottle. And per custom of the time and place, I tagged along with my parents wherever they went, attending more funerals in my first decade than most people do in a lifetime.

After reading a parenting expert’s column in the newspaper that makes it sound so easy, followed by phone calls from my daughters who make it sound so hard, I realized, in retrospect, that I was a mess of a mother. I plucked tacky plastic Halloween costumes off the rack at Kmart for my children. Fed them un-organic anything. Dressed them in environmentally destructive polyester because it didn’t need ironing – well, it’s a miracle my kids didn’t turn out to be sociopaths.

If Christians were raptured up to Heaven last Saturday as that fellow in California predicted, I didn’t know anybody good enough to make the cut. Since I hang out with a lot of church-going folk most every Sunday, that’s a disconcerting thought.

Ernie and I will soon be married 44 years, and until last week I’d never seen him read a book of poetry. But I’d carefully placed Sherry Chandler’s “Weaving a New Eden” on the table by his TV chair so that he could at least glance at it to say he had.
Sherry has been our chum since school days at Owen County High, and I thought he was obliged to flip through it. He’d also helped her a little with some genealogy research a few years ago, and I thought he might enjoy seeing what she’d done with her Roots-Web digging.

Boing.
Boing.
Boing.“What’s that sound?” Ernie bolted up in bed and fumbled for the alarm clock.
“What time is it?” I mumbled, trying to figure out where I was. I was pretty sure I wasn’t home. Maybe in a hotel room?
Oh no, could it be a tornado warning? Somewhere, against windows or maybe the roof, I could hear rain falling in torrents.

I haven’t seen her in 30 years. I doubt she’s still alive. Yet a month never passes that I don’t think about Mattie.
We met at a Weight Watchers class in Ashland, Ky. I’d recently lost 40 post-pregnancy pounds, and fearful I’d backslide, I stepped forward to become a Weight Watchers lecturer. With the fervor of the newly converted, I set out on an evangelical mission to save northeastern Kentucky and nearby West Virginia from the demons of obesity.